Early afternoon at Crystal Palace’s Beckenham headquarters and, as first-team players drift off contemplating their pre-match homework, Alan Pardew is talking about progress. He has left his analysts working out how best to customise a new computer program which will allow the manager to pore over previous performances with his squad, à la Gary Neville at his SkyPad, on a giant touchscreen television. The glorified tablet dominates the back wall of the main meeting room in the revamped complex.
Across the canteen area, in their own corner of an open-plan office, Pardew’s senior coaching team are sifting through scouting reports and preparing their summaries of Leicester City, opponents in waiting on Saturday. They are joined in their huddle by the sports psychologist and former England off-spinner Jeremy Snape, whose part-time role centres primarily on communication. “He’s not here to sit my players on a couch and ask them about their childhood,” Pardew says. “His job is to help me get my ideas across.”
There are time slots scheduled with medical and fitness staff whose mornings have already been spent keeping tabs on real-timedata from training to ensure no player exceeds his target mileage or workload, with injuries and recovery in mind. As for the homework, checks will be made on the central server that those to feature against the champions have scrutinised video clips of their immediate opponents, accessible via an app on their smartphones. The level of detail is painstaking on what would otherwise appear, to lurch into Uefa parlance, a run-of-the-mill “match day minus two”.
“It’s a different world to dear old Mitcham all those years ago,” says Pardew, reflecting fondly on Palace’s base during his playing days, when strength and conditioning revolved more around dreaded cross-country runs on windswept Farthing Downs or weights in a dingy unheated gym. “But you have to be right at the cutting edge. There is more knowledge out there, and you’ve got to use it or fall behind. That is what I’m being allowed to do here, on and off the pitch. I’ve been given the chance to make something special.
“When people ask me about England … well, if I was still at Newcastle, I’d be pretty keen on that England job. But, with all this here, I’m left thinking: ‘Why would I really want to leave this club now?’ Obviously, I’d like to win trophies, and that’s very difficult even if we did come ever so close last season. But that isn’t the only way to measure success. Success can be a legacy. Maybe I can create one here so that, one day, people look back and say: ‘When Pardew was there that was a great period for the club.’ I remember the chief executive at Southampton after Nicola Cortese thanking me for the platform I left them. That recognition is always nice. That’s like winning a trophy for me.”
It is 22 months since Pardew walked away from Newcastle, ninth in the top flight with average gates pushing 52,000, to return to his native south London and a club whose exploits first caught his imagination when Malcolm Allison, resplendent in his lucky fedora, took Palace to the 1976 FA Cup semi-finals. The team loitered just beneath the relegation cut-off but, if there had been any doubt about accepting the chairman Steve Parish’s approach, a phone call with Tony Pulis offered reassurance. “He’d walked away, but told me: ‘Pards, there’s a lot of growing that club could do. You can definitely take them forward.’ It reinforced what I’d suspected. The fans’ frustration with the owner [Mike Ashley] at Newcastle had turned to frustration with me and the owner, so the timing was right. And it wasn’t as much of a gamble as people thought. If I could keep Palace up, we’d be the only London-based Premier League team south of the river.” That was achieved with a 10th-place finish, establishing a platform for progression.
He had spent his first summer back at Palace overseeing the upgrade of the training complex and, aside from the signing of Yohan Cabaye, tweaking the playing squad. This time around, the changes implemented on the pitch have been more far-reaching. A team whose forte had been resilience and biting on the counterattack needed to impose themselves as they became more established at this level. That wretched run of league form, yielding two wins in 21 matches, over the second half of last season had convinced Pardew change was required. His mind had been made up long before the FA Cup final was lost to Manchester United. “Everyone pointed to a contrast between the first and second halves of our season but, while that existed in terms of results, it didn’t in terms of our ability to control games,” he says. “What that run showed me was we couldn’t properly impose control, and the depth of quality wasn’t there to cope with injuries.
“So we reacted, in terms of the first team but also up and down the club. You can point to the transfer policy, which has obviously stepped up in terms of the personnel we’re bringing in – Cabaye last summer, now Christian Benteke – but you don’t always get it right. When we finished fifth with Newcastle [in 2012] we felt changing Danny Simpson and getting in a better right-back would be the way forward. He left and, a few years later, became a Premier League title winner with Leicester. We joke about that when we see each other. So it’s not just about bringing players in.
“It’s also about what we do on the training pitch, even down to the keep-balls being different. We’re focusing on technique more, in recruitment and training across the age groups. We’re close to a tie-in with a team in Spain who produce good young players with a view to setting up a cultural and coaching exchange with them, seeing what they do differently through the academy and into the first team. And then there are the changes to the current team’s style out on the pitch.
“We’ll always be a good counterattacking team, a side at our best when in the lead, and trying to transform the approach without taking anything away from that threat is a challenge. I played here under Steve Coppell and even he’d admit his teams were very rigid. We bashed it down the sides, we were uncompromising, we pushed high up the pitch and put loads of crosses in the box. Well, we’ve retained a bit of that because we’re still the leading crossers in the Premier League. But what’s wrong with asking players to use their imagination, their game intelligence, as well as oomph and spirit? I don’t just want them to do basic things. I’m asking them to do complicated things.”
The summer signing who sets the tone is not Benteke at the team’s pinnacle, but Steve Mandanda at the other end. The Frenchman, secured for £1.4m from Marseille, is so comfortable with the ball at his feet that Pardew could argue he, rather than Pep Guardiola, kickstarted the summer’s fad for sweeper-keepers in English football. “I can’t believe we got a free run at him: he’s a France international; he’s been in Ligue 1’s equivalent of the PFA team of the year five times; he was captain of Marseille, a legend in the eyes of their fans. There is no mystery to this player. I told the chairman: ‘This guy will force us to play. Even if one or two of our players are a bit tentative and might not show for the ball, he’ll give it to them anyway. So they’d best be ready.’ His distribution has changed the way we play.
“Trying to make radical changes to the team’s style is risky, I know. But it’s not a risk without reward: a fifth year in the top flight, the most this club has ever had in one stretch, and another bonus in terms of the money to take the team forward. Playing as we did would get us 14th, 15th, all being well. Now, we could still finish 14th, but we would still have taken the club forward [in terms of the style]. It becomes more about keeping this group together. If I can do that for two years, and add to it in January and the summer, we’ll have a great chance of Europe. It’s about whether I can keep them fit, and whether or not, for example, a Paris Saint-Germain comes knocking for Christian if he scores 20 goals. If that happens he’s gone and I’ve got to find another player within our budget. Those things can happen. But, at the moment, we’ve built a good ship and it’s steaming in the right direction.”
The strength of Pardew’s relationship with Parish is key. “I speak to managers at bigger clubs who don’t have a good time, or even the same level of communication, with their chairmen,” he says. But there is regular dialogue, too, with the American investors Josh Harris and David Blitzer, who are consulted on all the major decisions. They recognise the need to redevelop Selhurst Park, plans which are edging closer to becoming concrete. They pushed for Benteke’s record £27m purchase and eventually considered Mandanda’s signing “a no-brainer”. “Americans are analytical in their sports, which are very stop-start, so the numbers tend to add up,” says Pardew. “That’s why Moneyball works for baseball. It doesn’t work so well for football because it’s a fluid game.
“So the stats don’t always tell the whole picture. It’s that education that I have to [deliver] because, if we just went on the numbers, it wouldn’t guarantee success. It’s about having the right numbers, the right athleticism, the right fit for this particular club. That’s where managers sometimes struggle with owners, but Steve helps me get my message across. David and Josh are very keen on growing the club. The redevelopment of the stadium is a big phase for them, and they’re big into community and producing our own talent. The problem we have, like most Premier League clubs, is our academy players now need to get past an international-standard player just to get on our bench, but I can still offer our youngsters a genuine route to the first-team. Luke Dreher trains with me almost every day. They’ve definitely got a chance, but they’ve got to be exceptionally good.”
The same might apply to English coaches if they aspire to overseeing a member of the elite. Pardew is the most experienced of their number in the top flight at present, a figure who, at 55, still envisages a future coaching abroad. “My agent is always going on at me to learn Spanish and have that in my locker … but the States are getting bigger, China’s getting bigger, the market’s getting bigger,” he says, for all that, one day, he would clearly relish the chance to manage his country. For now, he is backing his friend and former club-mate, Gareth Southgate, as “the right man” to carry the nation’s hopes.
Palace have Leicester to contemplate, a team still struggling to cope with N’Golo Kanté’s summer departure but boosted by yet another win in their Champions League group. Word has filtered through from the east Midlands that the champions’ players have held clear-the-air team meetings, exasperated by slack league form which has them 13th. “It’s a tricky game for us,” says Pardew, whose team’s five-match unbeaten run came to a juddering halt at home to West Ham last weekend. “They’ve had a little meeting on Monday, in-house, and kicked each other up the backside: ‘Forget the Champions League. We’ll be up for that anyway. Saturday is the game.’ And we’re coming off the back of a bad defeat. So this is a proper match. A top Premier League game.
“I’ve got to get the balance right between guarding against Leicester’s reaction, and keeping things positive for us going forward. It’s about making sure my team know what’s coming, how we can deal with it, and how we can exploit it. All these processes, the reviews, the analysis, the scouting reports, the reams of data, the players’ homework, the training drills, the meetings … they’re all about getting that right. For this weekend. And then it all starts all over again on Monday for the next one. Liverpool.” That is said with the enthusiasm of a man utterly at home in his surroundings.
